by ·Comments Off on Oppenheimer (2023, Christopher Nolan)

The Victor Garber-looking prosecutor is Jason Clarke – he ruins Oppenheimer’s career in 1954, sent by Atomic Energy Commissioner Robert Downey Jr, whose own career is then ruined by Oppenheimer-loyal scientists in a cabinet non-confirmation hearing in 1959.

Florence Pugh is here to have a steamy affair with Oppy, and Emily Blunt plays the steaming mad wife. General Matt Damon helps link to Nolan’s other film involving black holes. This inverts Interstellar by placing its avant-science imagery over the early backstory segments and saving the real-world tedium for the final hour – an extraordinarily talky movie. I’d willingly watch it again, but if I can spare three hours for Cillian Murphy movies, I might just watch Red Eye twice.

by ·Comments Off on Sun Don’t Shine (2012, Amy Seimetz)

Kate Lyn Sheil’s husband is dead in the trunk, and her new man Kentucker Audley is driving them from Jacksonville to Tampa to hide his body, but they’re not very smart criminals and end up racking up another body. Maybe in the wrong mood for this – Kate playing not-smart isn’t working for me.

by ·Comments Off on Sorcerer (1977, William Friedkin)

Memorial screening for Friedkin. I thought about rewatching Bug, but should really check this out – I’d avoided it after deciding Wages of Fear couldn’t be topped. And maybe not, but nearly equaled. Same story of two trucks with redundant supplies of unstable dynamite heading for an oil-well fire over treacherous terrain, but this time the drivers are more desperate than ever, after an extended intro showing each of their criminal enterprises that led them to hide out in South America under fake names. 1970s Lead Character Roy Scheider drives with shady Francisco Rabal, and in the other truck is gentleman fraudster Bruno Cremer (a Brisseau star) and Jerusalem bomber Amidou (later in the Friedkin-indebted Ronin).

The great Filipe Furtado:

What for Clouzot is social need, for Friedkin is self-punishment. First world crimes reimagined in a third world purgatory, an amusement park of unforgiven nature. The beauty is that everything is translated in pure action … Francisco Rabal’s taciturn killer is the film’s heart and Bruno Cremer’s masochist banker it is clear-eyed soul.

by ·Comments Off on Female Trouble (1974, John Waters)

“Who wants to be famous? Who wants to die for art?” I should’ve watched this a very long time ago, like before Cecil B. Demented. Divine is Dawn, who storms out of her parents’ house as a teenager since she didn’t get the cha-cha heels she wanted for Christmas, immediately gets pregnant, flash-forward and she’s got a teenage daughter called Taffy (Mink Stole) and a hairdresser husband named Gator.

Divine & The Dashers:

Then the plot goes haywire. Taffy seeks out her real father (also Divine) and stabs him to death, then threatens to join the Hare Krishas. Gator’s aunt Ida throws acid in Dawn’s face, and the Dasher photographers who own Gator’s hair salon try to make the disfigured Dawn famous, everyone agreeing that she looks even more beautiful now. None of the performances are “bad” because they’re all on the same heightened wavelength, but the dialogue is mostly yelling and it finally gets tiresome during the court scene that sends Dawn to the electric chair.

Post-acid Dawn with daughter and caged Aunt Ida (Edith Massey):

by ·Comments Off on Mission Impossible 7: Dead Reckoning 1 (2023, Christopher McQuarrie)

We prepped by rewatching part one, where Kittridge was a standout, just the gov’t boss who has to say all the plotty dialogue, but he turns it into a twitchy physical performance, so we were psyched for his big return. I think I got the plot here, but not the allegiances – Cruise and Kittridge are both trying to destroy the world-domination superconnected AI, but Kittridge’s guys (Shea Wigham from a lotta shows and a guy named Tarzan from Top Gun 2) keep shooting at Cruise. Thief Hayley Atwell is a welcome addition, comes fully onboard just as Rebecca Ferguson checks out. Rhames and Pegg are trying to be the tech help when tech can no longer be trusted. Weapons broker Vanessa Kirby (soon to be Joaquin’s Josephine) is excellent as herself and her mask-self. Human baddie Gabriel (Esai Morales of The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit) is both an AI stooge and a boogeyman from Cruise’s pre-agent past, who falls out with his muscle Pom “Mantis” Klementieff at the last minute. After a thousand sleight-of-hand tricks, Cruise has the key and knows it unlocks a beta version of the AI in a sunken submarine… somewhere in the world.

by ·Comments Off on Mission: Impossible 2 (2000, John Woo)

John Woo’s follow-up to Blackjack, a Dolph Lundgren movie I’d never heard of before this moment. But he was obviously chosen based on his Face/Off experience in mask-based deception, and his ability to make dudes look extremely cool riding motorcycles, wearing leather jackets and sunglasses, kicking ass surrounded by explosions, jumping through the air whilst firing two guns.

Thandiwe Newton bounces between hero and villain (Dougray Scott of Ever After). Anthony Hopkins too embarrassed to be credited as the mission leader even though his other credit that year was the Jim Carrey Grinch movie. Aussies: Ving is joined by John Polson in the chopper and the baddie is assisted by finger-trauma Richard Roxburgh. Evil henchman William Mapother had been in Magnolia, but I think not in the Cruise scenes, and the scientist who sets off the whole plot by creating a supervirus runs the costume shop in Eyes Wide Shut. Bad guys just want to spread the virus across Sydney after securing stock options in Brendan Gleeson’s chem company that will manufacture the cure, and stock options are a boring reason to get the whole IMF on your ass, killing you and your friends, but at least they do it in style.

by ·Comments Off on Locorazo 2018/2023

It’s the fifth annual Locorazo Festival, a reprise of Locarno’s lineup from five years ago, viewed alone at home during this year’s in-person festival.

Locorazo-week viewings linked in green, regular blue links are films I’d seen previously, unlinked are films of interest that I haven’t watched yet.

Concorso Competition

A Land Imagined (Yeo Siew Hua)
Hotel by the River (Hong Sangsoo)
La Flor (Mariano Llinás)
A Family Tour (Ying Liang)
Genesis (Philippe Lesage)
Ray & Liz (Richard Billingham)
Too Late to Die Young (Dominga Sotomayor)
Alice T. (Radu Muntean)
Diane (Kent Jones)
Yara (Abbas Fahdel)
M (Yolande Zauberman)

Filmmakers of the Present (first and second features)

Fausto (Andrea Bussmann)
Sophia Antipolis (Virgil Vernier)
A Family Submerged (María Alché)
Dead Horse Nebula (Tarik Aktas)
All Good (Eva Trobisch)

Piazza Grande (open air screenings, out of competition)

Coincoin and the Extra-Humans (Bruno Dumont)
BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee)
Blaze (Ethan Hawke)
Birds of Passage (Ciro Guerra & Cristina Gallego)
Ruben Brandt, Collector (Milorad Krstić)
Searching (Aneesh Chaganty)
Manila in the Claws of Light (Lino Brocka)
Liberty (Leo McCarey)

Signs of Life (new forms and innovation)

The Glorious Acceptance of Nicolas Chauvin (Benjamin Crotty)
How Fernando Pessoa Saved Portugal (Eugène Green)
A Room with a Coconut View (Tulapop Saenjaroen)
Erased, Ascent of the Invisible (Ghassan Halwani)
Man in the Well (Hu Bo)
Gulyabani (Gürcan Keltek)
The Grand Bizarre (Jodie Mack)
Veslemøy’s Song (Sofia Bohdanowicz)
Communion Los Angeles (Peter Bo Rappmund & Adam Levine)
Sedução da Carne (Júlio Bressane)

Fuori Concorso (non-competitive, features by established filmmakers)

Narcissister Organ Player (Narcissister)
Acid Forest (RugilÄ— BarzdžiukaitÄ—)

Other Sections and One-Offs

An Elephant Sitting Still (Hu Bo)
Words, Planets (Laida Lertxundi)
Seymour: an introduction (Ethan Hawke)
L’Humanite (Bruno Dumont)
and a full Leo McCarey retrospective

by ·Comments Off on Narcissister Organ Player (2018, Narcissister)

Entertaining doc made by a performance artist. With the name Narcissister, you expect much self-reflection, but Narcissus’ downfall was looking at himself, so the doc subject avoids showing her true face onscreen or in public. She may not even be the doc subject, since the film turns into a love letter to her mother, making a good case that mom was remarkable.

Solidly put together, other than getting cut-happy whenever they’ve got two angles on a scene. Nice animated additions by Martha Colburn. Narc’s show is somewhere between performance art, visual poetry, and prop comedy (not a lot of movies where the director/star gets pooped out of a giant butt). Family backstory with help from her brother’s home movies, and discussion of their relationships (Narc would create art pieces, then mom would tell her what they mean).

by ·Comments Off on Locorazo Shorts 2023

The Glorious Acceptance of Nicolas Chauvin (Benjamin Crotty)

A bit of anti-historical fun by the guy who made Fort Buchanan. Napoleonic soldier Chauvin is resurrected to collect some award, his acceptance speech turns into a fantasy that gets away from him, leading to some resurrected medieval dude pitchforking Chauvin’s girl, and explaining that the reason Chauvin can’t remember his parents is that he’s a fictional character invented by playwrights.

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How Fernando Pessoa Saved Portugal (Eugène Green)

Carloto Cotta (Tabu, Diamantino) plays an office writer hired to create a local slogan for Coca-Cola, asks his would-be poet friend for advice. The slogan succeeds only in alarming the health ministry (led by Oliveira star Diogo Dória) into banning the drink. Also a bit of fun, but not as anarchic as Chauvin, calm and precise like La Sapienza, full of direct-to-camera address.

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Erased/Palimpsest: Ascent of the Invisible (Ghassan Halwani)

The goal was to watch this feature, but I turned it off after 20 minuttes, so adding it to the shorts. Logging a movie I didn’t watch is not standard procedure, but I make the rules here. It’s investigating war photos and portraits of the disappeared, memorializing them properly, drawing and animating them to give them new life, exposing missing-person flyers covered up by years of advertising posters. Serious and worthy concept, but the methodical slowness of it was too much for me – a single still image was onscreen for six of the first ten minutes, and I bailed during a montage of news articles on mass graves.

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A Room With a Coconut View (Tulapop Saenjaroen)

iMovie title effects and an AI voice speaking Thai giving a hotel tour, doesn’t seem promising. Then an English AI voice starts challenging her on the mechanics of what is seen, until we’re getting scientific explanations of how sea waves are formed. “Oh no, the images are bleeding.” A new English narrator appears as the male English narrator leaves the Thai AI and goes on a voyage… discussion of the nature of tourism… one AI smokes a joint. Great movie.

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Gulyabani (Gürcan Keltek)

Placid visual and narrated poetry, hard to adjust to this after the more insane Coconut View. No people are seen, narrator is a girl, molested by her dad, thought to be a prophet by the villagers. “Two actions may look the same, but one may be evil and one may not.” A very serious story involving military coups and child prostitution, but I was tuned out due to the problems of the work week. The director’s feature Meteors had played Locarno the previous year.

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Man in the Well (Hu Bo)

Not about a a man in a well… featureless hooded figures wander a post-apocalyptic wasteland looking for food. Very different from the Elephant movie, except in its pacing. They find a dead person and immediately dig in with a saw. I guess they chuck the body down a hole – is that the man in the well? Odd little movie.